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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/27528556">tell me (what's your motive?)</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/maggierachael/pseuds/maggierachael'>maggierachael</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>Labyrinth (1986)</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>F/M, Fluff, aka jareth is a dumb lovesick little shit, and sarah just wants a nap, did not start this as a shippy thing but look at where we are now, happy birthday saz your idiot mans is here, jareth has manners only when he wants to, labyrinth was like, the first film i ever really loved so i am SHOCKED it took me this long to write this, we stan shipping a couple for seventeen years of your life</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2020-11-12</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2020-11-12</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-08 06:22:19</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>General Audiences</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>No Archive Warnings Apply</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>5,904</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/27528556</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/maggierachael/pseuds/maggierachael</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>Nothing says Friday night like a Goblin King perched against your central air unit. </p>
<p>Or: Jareth is a wine snob and Sarah gets an unexpected birthday visit.</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Relationships:</b></td><td>Jareth/Sarah Williams</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>6</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>79</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>tell me (what's your motive?)</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p>it’s a quarter after one,<br/>i’m a little drunk<br/>and i need you now...</p>
    </blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>
  <span>The visits had to end the day she turned eighteen. </span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>They were fun while they lasted. There’s nothing quite like working through a calculus problem with the help of a goblin and a monster the size of your dad’s Lincoln, or trying to vacuum at midnight because said friends left glitter all over the carpet. The feeling of having friends around, no matter how weird you acted or how much you changed, was nice. Nice for a sixteen-year-old who never quite let go of her fairy stories, of her tales of ghosts and goblins and things lurking just outside one’s field of vision. Constant companions are something a young girl ought to have at Sarah Williams’ age. </span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>Whether those friends should come in the form of magical creatures was debatable, but she didn’t care. </span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>She’d never wanted to let go of it. She never wanted to forget the fervent giggles at midnight, or the Scrabble tournaments with Didymus that almost ended with game pieces in her hair. It was too important - more important than Madonna, or the mall, or anything else her school friends thought was the peak of being a teenager. It was more important than math tests, and homecoming, and all the dreaded college applications that made her hand cramp around her pencil. The Underground - or what she chose to see of it - was Sarah’s nirvana. </span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>The acceptances started to come in just before her birthday. She hadn’t really expected them to be honest. She thought Columbia would laugh in her face for her essay. She hadn’t considered what it was she actually wanted to do. She liked stories. She liked telling them, being a part of them. She didn’t want to turn into her mother, so theater was out of the question. She felt, unsurprisingly, like every other seventeen-year-old abruptly forced into deciding the course of their lives in the span of weeks.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>She didn’t receive many acceptances - hadn’t applied to many schools to begin with. They trickled in slowly, appearing in her mailbox like gifts wrapped in barbed wire. It was a strange, disarming process, but like all things she’d faced before - bog of stench included - she took it one step at a time. Each a step closer to adulthood, a step into a world even scarier than that of labyrinths and oubliettes and strange men with vile promises. </span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>After much wailing and gnashing of teeth, she decided on a tiny school upstate, the one with a writing program that didn’t scare or bore her to tears. Not too far from home, all things considered, but far enough that she’d feel like her own person. She needed the space, the freedom from what everyone else thought of her and what she should do with her life. Sometimes you just need to be around people who </span>
  <em>
    <span>don’t </span>
  </em>
  <span>know that you dressed as Cinderella five Halloweens in a row. </span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>Well, for the most part. </span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>It hadn’t been an easy conversation to have. No one wants to look their closest companions in the face and tell them they have to leave. Some distant part of Sarah’s brain had hoped they might be able to come with her, that the standing mirror they always traveled through wasn’t the only point of contact between her world and theirs. It was a childish hope, but she was barely beyond childhood as it was. And her friends knew that. </span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“It’s too difficult for us to come through there,” they’d said. “We'd have to punch a new hole in the veil, and even Ludo isn’t strong enough for that.” </span>
</p>
<p>
  <em>
    <span>Ludo certainly seemed strong enough for everything else, </span>
  </em>
  <span>she’d thought. Which her manners translated to something like, </span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“It’s okay,” she’d said. “You’ll still see me on holidays.” </span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>And they did. They shared pumpkin pie on Thanksgiving, and Sarah saved extra allowance to get them all Christmas presents. They acted like nothing had ever changed, even as Sarah inevitably did. Her eye turned more toward </span>
  <em>
    <span>Tiger Beat </span>
  </em>
  <span>than </span>
  <em>
    <span>Tales of the Weird, </span>
  </em>
  <span>and her stories had increasingly more to do with the normal and everyday. She would never betray her friends, but she couldn’t help as her own perspective grew. </span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>All things considered, Sarah Williams grew up. </span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>________</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>Years pass in instants when you stop paying attention. A blink of an eye and you’re suddenly an adult, suddenly full of a life you don’t remember living. Days pass like seconds, now you’re twenty-one, twenty-two, twenty-three, the weight of the world pressing down on your shoulders and the universe in your head nearly gone. You buy pressed suits and sell all of your toys, you move across the state and stop coming home. Home is no longer your room at your parents’, it’s someplace else. Someplace that doesn’t feel permanent quite yet, but has to be. Someplace without the memories and the reminders and that Sharpie kingdom you never told your stepmother you drew on the closet wall. </span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>You choose a life for yourself and, like Sarah, end up pity-drinking in a college apartment the day you turn twenty-five. </span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>She hadn’t intended for it to turn out like this. Hadn’t intended to go to grad school, to stop coming home for the weekends because the workload got too stressful. She hadn’t planned to nearly lose the one thing that made her </span>
  <em>
    <span>her</span>
  </em>
  <span>. She’d never lost her spark, but it dimmed, outshone by sorority rushes and Gothic literature and a chance to follow dreams she’d never realized she had. It stayed inside her, but had fewer and fewer reasons to come out. It became the mark of her childhood, traded in for an English degree and a string of boyfriends and a sudden lack of imagination that meant she struggled to string more than a sentence together at a time. </span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>She never stopped seeing magic everywhere she went, but the real world seeped into the cracks of her brain until she realized she hadn’t seen her otherworldly friends in years. </span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>It wasn’t a bad birthday, all things considered. Her lecture had been cancelled and she’d gotten cards from her family in the mail. She wasn’t eighty-five percent coffee grounds for once, and she had a niggling feeling she was going to get an A on her last paper. For once, she felt mostly human and marginally at peace. </span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>But one should never be working on a dissertation alone on their birthday. </span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>Working was a stretch, but that’s what she was calling it. It sounded slightly better than “staring blankly at a piece of paper at 9PM, waiting for the inevitable noise of her flatmate’s keys in the front door, joined unwelcomely by the sound of her partner who couldn’t keep his hands off her for more than fifteen seconds at a time, even in public”. At least work gave her desperation a context, put a purpose to her complete and utter desire to drill a hole in her own forehead. </span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>One project, she thought, and I’ll be done. One more presentation, and she’d be out of the hole she’d dug for herself when she decided to get a master’s degree to please her parents. She was so close to being free, if only the universe would just cooperate with her - even though she knew it rarely did. </span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>It was more likely to confuse and disorient her, send her spinning as it had so many times before. One foot in front of the other gets the job done, she knew that, but it didn’t help her aspiration to leap wildly to a conclusion before she was prepared for it. She was a child playing hopscotch in the street, her brain everywhere but the task at hand. The chair she was sitting in, the posters on her wall, the way her pencils were arranged on her desk...all infinitely more fascinating than the thing she desperately wanted done.  </span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>It was those kinds of nights when Sarah noticed everything and anything about the world, just the way she used to. It was a superpower, a trick like riding a bike that she never really forgot how to do. </span>
  <em>
    <span>Take nothing for granted, </span>
  </em>
  <span>she’d learned, and she put it to use. Everything had its significance - the way the world looked (especially when you checked twice), the way it sounded, even the way it smelled - tonight, something vaguely like pine needles and the vanilla scent of her favorite lipstick from the drugstore. </span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>It was nice for a moment, that sensation, like the distant memory of a fall long gone. Sarah wondered briefly if Tami had come home without her noticing - one of her candles on the mantle had to smell something like that. She certainly hadn’t lit anything, not with all the paper lying about everywhere. Maybe she could ask her for help with the dissertation. Literature majors had to stick together, right?</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“All alone on her birthday.” </span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>His voice hit Sarah like a truck, a sound she’d come to remember only from her dreams - the fleeting melody of a song she could never quite remember. It wormed its way into her veins and sent her heart rate skyrocketing, some drug she never realized she’d withdrawn from. It was a miracle and a nightmare all at once. That voice was not something normal, sane adults ever heard, ever deigned to believe was even real. Sarah was a sane adult, had been for years. </span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>But nothing says Friday night like a Goblin King perched against your central air unit. </span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“Sarah, Sarah, Sarah. I expected better from you.” </span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>He looked different. Not older - not in the way you’d expect of another person after nine years - but different, like the oppressive environment of a college campus had taken away all of his otherworldly shine. His clothes, she noticed, were lacking in flair, and his hair no longer looked like he’d stuck it a finger in an electrical socket. With the exception of his eyes, still framed by the eyebrows that reminded her of a goth, he looked something eerily akin to normal. </span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>That couldn’t possibly be a good sign.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>Her years living in dorms was perhaps the only reason Sarah didn’t scream. Invasion of (debatable) privacy was nothing new, so seeing the man(?) who’d sent her on a life-threatening quest should be a piece of cake. She shouldn’t need to move from her chair, shouldn’t need to yell for help or call the cops or any of the other things her rational mind was telling her to do. This should, theoretically, be no more difficult than the coursework sitting in front of her. </span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“You’re tracking glitter.”</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>It wasn’t a lie. She wasn’t sure if it was genetic or just a consequence of Jareth’s excess, but he never seemed to go anywhere without leaving a trail of sparkling dust in his wake - and now, on her floor. There’d been no dramatic entrance through the window, but it was there nonetheless, trailed from the window above her bed to where he stood like a long, sparkling river.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>That was going to be a bitch to vacuum in the morning. </span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“Such hospitality.”</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>Despite its effect on her, his voice held none of the venom Sarah remembered - whether that was a consequence of adulthood or merely the situation, she couldn’t be sure. He sounded mildly amused, even, as he loomed over her enough to certainly stain her hair with glitter for weeks. </span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“‘Oh, thank you, Jareth,’” he mimicked in a cheap imitation of her voice. “‘Thank you for coming to see me on such an auspicious occasion. Piercing the veil between worlds must be so difficult when there’s so many witnesses around.’”</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>Sarah shrugged, still immobile in her chair. </span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“I could’ve started screaming for help,” she said. “Would you have preferred that?”</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>Jareth frowned, which didn’t suit his already unreal-looking features. </span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“Do you really detest me that much, my dear?”</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“It’s been nine years.” Sarah started to bob in the chair the way RAs always told undergraduates not to, pushing the flexible back until it was liable to send her toppling to the floor. “I’m not exactly thrilled to see the guy who stole my baby brother leaning on my AC unit.” </span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>Focusing on not breaking her chair or her skull was about the only way Sarah could avoid processing the situation in front of her. She didn’t want to, nor did she think she was capable of it, and maybe if she curled her nails into her palms enough, she’d wake up like Dorothy Gale, hungover on her floor, with her roommate standing above her saying it was all just a dream. </span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>Instead, she just felt like she’d had a house dropped on her. </span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“How is little Toby?”</span>
  <span><br/>
</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>Jareth, unlike Sarah, seemed completely unbothered, the magical equivalent of some distant relation at a reunion asking a question she had no interest in or knowledge to answer. It could’ve been unsettling, the ease with which he moved around her space as though he knew it - part of the reason Sarah still hung privacy curtains to hide from the prying eyes of certain birds. But, considering Didymus’s stories of how much he’d pouted after she’d beat his labyrinth, the casual assertiveness bothered her less than her confusion over his presence.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“He must be half your height by now.”</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>His eyes drifted around the room, settling briefly on the decorations that illustrated her adult life, and Sarah scoffed. Was he serious, or just taking the piss? Coming all the way from...wherever the hell the Underground was just to make small talk seemed like a stretch, even for him. </span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“He’s ten now, thank you very much.” She lifted some of the pressure from her chair, squirming uncomfortably without knowing what else to do. She wasn’t about to admit that Toby was, in fact, over half her height now. “And not emotionally traumatized, thank God.”</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>Something like what a normal person would’ve called a smile appeared on Jareth’s face. (All Sarah could process was “oh god, he can actually emote, I don’t know what to make of that”.)</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“I wouldn’t have thought as much,” he said. “He and I had quite the time together while you were running my labyrinth.” </span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“I wouldn’t know,” Sarah replied, “I was busy getting chased by bird people who wanted to pull my head off.” </span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“An unfortunate side effect of straying from the path.” </span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>Sarah could think of a few more appropriate words than “unfortunate” for what she had gone through, but she chose to keep her mouth shut. </span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“You cut your hair.”</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>He raised a hand to gesture vaguely at Sarah’s face, and her hand drifted to her hair instinctively. She hadn’t kept her hair long since high school, but she ran her fingers through it anyway, brushing along the ends of the bob she’d worked hard to make a part of her new, non-schoolgirlish identity. She could say the same of his hair - the lack of the Motley Crue look left her oddly unsettled - but she refrained. </span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“As most people tend to do,” she said. If she leaned any farther into making small talk with Jareth, she was fairly certain her brain would leak out of her ears. “Not all of us strive to look like we’ve got a Pekingese on our heads.”</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>Had they been playing baseball, the height at which that comment sailed over Jareth’s head could’ve gotten Sarah a home run. </span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“If you’re going to keep me from my work,” she muttered after several seconds of silence, “The least you could do is help me down this thing.” </span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>She pointed to the paperweight currently holding her notebook open - a green, uncorked bottle of the cheapest white wine she could find at the grocery store. It’d been a failed incentive to finish her outline, of which she’d downed most of a glass of before staring at her notes with the realization that she needed to completely rethink her entire dissertation. About the last thing she wanted to do was lose the rational part of her to booze, but maybe if she could drink herself into oblivion, staring a goblin king down wouldn’t seem nearly as bad. </span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>That would’ve been a significant advantage nine years ago. </span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>Jareth’s eyes flicked from her to the bottle, and Sarah felt a sigh of relief escape her as his attention shifted to the pages of notebook paper she had scattered across every flat surface in her room. To a lesser person who hadn’t dealt with his ego before, it would’ve looked embarrassing. To Sarah, she hoped (in vain) that the chaos of it might scare him off. </span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>They tossed the weight of the room’s silence between them like an exercise ball, daring one another to either accept the offer or back down -  an Olympic sport of epic proportions, to be sure. They paid attention to everything but one another, as though they didn’t want the other to know they cared. </span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>Shockingly, Jareth was the first to break. </span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“Wilde’s useless anyway.” His eyes remained on her notes, gliding over her illegible handwriting about Lady Windermere and the reclamation of femininity in Victorian fiction. “Sounds like some of my guards after they’ve gone and knocked themselves on the head.”</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>Sarah scoffed.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“Sounds like you need better guards.” </span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“And you need a better curriculum.” </span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“What do you know about my curriculum?”</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>She certainly didn’t think he had a master’s in English from Columbia, despite his tendency to talk like a Shakespeare character. She gave him as much of a skeptical look as she could muster, and he answered with a smile, not even needing to meet her eyes.  </span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“There is more for me in this world than simply you, Sarah,” he said. “I have seen my fair share of the things that make up this universe. Including the life and times of men like Oscar Wilde.” </span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>He flicked at the pages of her notes with one gloved hand, and Sarah could feel the earth shift with her eye roll. She didn’t even want to think about the implications of how he’d phrased that sentence.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“You want the wine or not?”</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>Jareth shrugged. </span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“It would be rude to refuse the birthday girl.” </span>
</p>
<p>
  <em>
    <span>As if you know the definition of rude. </span>
  </em>
</p>
<p>
  <span>Ambitiously, she’d bought a pack of solo cups currently stashed next to her desk - as if she would’ve had anyone to share with - but the idea of serving wine to her childhood adversary in cheap red plastic was too much for even her. So, her only option was to slide as graciously out of her chair as she possibly could and pray Tami wouldn’t ask her how she’d spent her weekend.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>She hesitated to leave him alone in her room, but she’d rather him see her collection of CDs than the embarrassment that was the mountain of dishes in her sink, so she dashed out into the kitchen in an attempt at the world’s fastest in-home bartending. (Since when was embarrassment the first worry on her list when she was in the same room as Jareth?) The best she could find was a chipped Disneyland mug from home, so she yanked it from the cupboard with a clatter and moved as fast as she could back to her bedroom without making it seem like she cared at all about what was happening. </span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>He hadn’t turned any of her jewelry into insects upon her return, so she took that as a good sign even as a chill ran down her back. (She credited it to the realization that she was standing in front of a budget Dave Gahan in shorts and a New York Giants shirt.) In a move that would’ve gotten her exactly zero bartending jobs, she uncorked the bottle of wine with a pen cap and tried to remember to invest in an actual bottle opener. </span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>In went the wine and up went Jareth’s eyebrows (an amusing sight considering their shape), and she couldn’t tell what was more embarrassing - the mug, or the fact that he had to stare at her massive John Taylor poster while he drank. Mercifully, he chose to comment on neither. </span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“Thank you.” </span>
</p>
<p>
  <em>
    <span>The Goblin King has table manners. Who’d’ve thought. </span>
  </em>
</p>
<p>
  <span>Even for as toned-down as he looked, the visual of Jareth, half-leaning against her cheap wooden desk, holding a mug with Mickey Mouse plastered all over it was probably enough to cause brain damage in anyone other than Sarah. That was one for the scrapbook, certainly. </span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>She picked up her own cup slowly as she watched Jareth lift his own to his lips, the one defense she had left against the weirdness currently going down in her bedroom. He took a tentative sip, and Sarah watched as his face soured like he’d bitten into a rotten fruit - the same look Toby gave when his mother tried to feed him broccoli. Sarah hadn’t ever seen him look that disdained, even when she’d beat him at his own game. If he hadn’t been a literal fairy king who was technically violating the rules of her no-strangers-in-the-apartments-after-eight agreement, it might’ve even made her laugh.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“One would think you’d’ve splurged on something a bit...better quality for such an occasion.”</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>So he isn’t a snob when it comes to randomly stealing children, but he is when it comes to wine. Good to know. </span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“One,” Sarah pointed at the mug, “it’s from my dad, and two, you try buying booze on a grad school budget. Not all of us can just magic up the funds for expensive cabernet.” </span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“And what makes you think I can do that?” Jareth asked. </span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“I dunno.” She shrugged. “You can roofie a peach, so who’s to say you can’t pull money out of thin air? I don’t know how your magic works.” </span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“I would have thought we were past that, my dear.” </span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“I’ll be past it the day I stop having nightmares about broken glass and masquerade masks. Which my therapist says will probably be never, so.” </span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>Sarah took a long pull from her own mug, staring at the space just past Jareth’s head as she considered what she’d just admitted. That diagnosis might change, she thought, if she actually explained </span>
  <em>
    <span>why </span>
  </em>
  <span>she had those nightmares, but she at least wanted to finish her master’s before someone had her committed. She’d promised Hoggle that much. </span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“Why now?” </span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>It was a thought that escaped her mouth before she could wrangle it in. The sensible part of her didn’t </span>
  <em>
    <span>want</span>
  </em>
  <span> to know the motivation behind Jareth’s sudden appearance. The quicker she could blow it off as a hallucination or a coincidence, the better. But nothing breaks down barriers better than plain curiosity. </span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“Pardon me?” </span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>Jareth looked at her with what she assumed was as close to surprise as an egotistical, otherworldly being could get - one eyebrow raised, posture as tense as a wound spring. Of all the responses to get, she hadn’t expected to catch him off-guard. She didn’t even think he was capable of that. </span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“Why come visit me now?” she asked. “Why risk being seen by a million other hormonal college girls or getting stuck here for some godforsaken reason? What’s so special about my birthday? And if you say it’s because I’m ‘finally a real adult’ or some shit, I’ll scream so loud the whole campus will hear me.” </span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>For all her sense about wanting to forget about...whatever this was, Sarah considered it a legitimate question. The others came and went like it was no issue, given that they came through the same place every time. She’d been in regular contact with the Underground for the better part of ten years, so what had stopped him from bothering her like this?</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>She could only really remember it happening once before, and she couldn’t even confirm it. One bizarre day at the mall, hanging out with hometown friends before they all went off to school. A moment of deja vu, a feeling she couldn’t even understand until later - like someone was watching her. Someone she knew, but couldn’t name. </span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>And not too many men walked around upstate New York with blonde hair cascading down their backs. </span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>So what made today different?</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“I could ask the same thing of you.” </span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>Ever the king of deflection, Jareth raised one crowbar-shaped eyebrow at her as an excuse to avoid taking another sip from his drink, which he was now fiddling with as much as one of his infernal, shiny crystal balls. </span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“Why are you alone on your birthday?” he inquired. “Why are you not with friends, people who care about you? I’d practically say you wanted me to come, being isolated like this.”</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“I want you here about as badly as I want to fail my dissertation.” Sarah gestured to the wild mess of work on her desk, with a grimace that gave away maybe more than she’d intended. “And if you must know, my friends are busy, my roommate is with her boyfriend, and I don’t exactly want to sit at the union bar all on my own.”</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“So you would rather sit unaccompanied in your room and drink out of cheap plastic feeling sorry for yourself?” </span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>A low dig, even for him, Sarah thought. </span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“Well, clearly I’m not alone now,” she muttered, “So I guess that’s one problem solved.”</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“I live to serve.”</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>She didn’t want to think about what that meant, so she backpedalled until she was leaning against the frame of her bed, putting as much space as she could between her and the man who’d explicitly asked her to fear him the last time they’d been in the same room. She could see him better that way, examine him in a way that wasn’t so obviously leery. As a child, he’d given off a vibe that was magnetic, but in the way that made her want to cross the street to get away from him. It was a kind of power that no human was used to, the sense of unease that they feel walking home alone at night. She felt less of that now, but maybe that was just the alcohol clouding her better judgement. </span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“Maybe you should take up bartending in your spare time.” She swirled what remained of her drink in her glass, as if to demonstrate her point. “Clearly being king doesn’t eat up too much of your day.”</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>She had no idea what running a gobin kingdom actually looked like - aside from scaring poor young girls and terrorizing them until they humiliated him - but it felt good to get the dig in anyway. Unfortunately, it didn’t seem to bother Jareth enough to grant any more than a vague gesture of his hand and another disquieting smile. </span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“Time is irrelevant, dear Sarah.”</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>He, to his credit, took another sip from his hilariously mismatched mug as he gazed at her - and to hers, she didn’t falter at the sound of him calling her dear. No worse than some stranger calling her “babe” at the bar, right?</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“Tell that to my professors,” she said before downing the last swig of her wine. “You’re avoiding my question.”</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>If goblin kings could pout, that was the expression Jareth made.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“Am I not allowed to wish you a happy birthday in person?” he replied. “Your little friends do it every year, and you never seem to mind.”</span>
</p>
<p>
  <em>
    <span>He knows about that?</span>
  </em>
</p>
<p>
  <span>S</span>
  <span>arah wondered just how much of her life he’d kept track of without her ever knowing a tick.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“Yes, but calling </span>
  <em>
    <span>you</span>
  </em>
  <span> my friend is a stretch.”</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>She debated jumping up on her bed and getting comfortable, since her childhood sleep paralysis demon clearly showed no signs of leaving, but that might make him think she was okay having him there. Which she wasn’t, to be clear - though she was slowly accepting the fact that her evening plans had been thrown directly in the dumpster.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“And you didn’t even have the decency to get me a gift to make up for that roofied peach.” </span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>She said it with a smirk that she couldn’t keep off her face, though she couldn’t tell whether it was from any actual sense of warped amusement or just the wine. “Or stealing my brother. I’m starting to think you might actually hate me, Goblin King.” </span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>She hadn’t </span>
  <em>
    <span>actually</span>
  </em>
  <span> expected a gift - not too many men break and enter in order to leave things instead of taking them. Though, unless Jareth planned to kidnap her (in which case that random self-defense class she’d taken would come in handy), there wasn’t much of value for him to steal away. She just liked getting on Jareth’s nerves.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>And vice-versa, apparently. </span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“Who’s to say I didn’t bring you a gift?” he asked, looking shocked in that mock-offended way posh love interests always did in Jane Austen films. Had he not swapped the breeches and the silly ruffled shirt, he might have even looked the part. </span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>Sarah made an exaggerated point of looking around, as though playing hide and seek with a child. She was twenty-five - she wasn’t about to play mindames with a fairy king again. </span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“Well,” she said, “you seem pretty empty-handed at the moment, so—“ </span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“Sarah!”</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>The voice cut her off mid-sentence, loud and twangy and distinctly not the voice of her roommate or her partner. It came from the general vicinity of the living room, muffled by the clear presence of the apartment’s front door keeping it from coming through. But even muffled, and accompanied by a rather loud knock, it was a voice she couldn’t ever forget. </span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>She glanced from Jareth, out into the hallway, then back again. Maybe she’d hallucinated it. Maybe she’d hit her head coming back from the kitchen two hours ago and this was all some bizarre dream that she’d have to tell her therapist next week. </span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“Sarah! We brought cake!” </span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>Another knock, too harsh and too distinct to be a dream. Jareth raised an eyebrow, and the smile on his face as he gestured for her to go sent a chill down the base of her spine. </span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“Don’t want to keep your guests waiting, do you?” </span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>The fact that she only partially wanted to smack him concerned Sarah deeply. </span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“You are the most distinctly annoying person I’ve ever met.”</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>She pointed an accusatory finger at him as though it would do anything, and then turned on her heel, eager to reach the door before the knocking began again and started to concern other boarders on her floor. The panic of leaving Jareth alone in her apartment was a mere afterthought, overtaken by a combined sense of fear and excitement that flooded her veins more than any drink could. </span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>She could feel his eyes on her back as she left, nearly tripping over a backpack left in the bedroom hallway on her way to the door. It barely fazed her, her gaze tunnel-visioned towards the front door as she dashed towards it as quickly as one can without completely losing their composure. The lock gave her trouble, and then the chain made it even worse, but the door nearly came off its hinges anyway, yanked open by a five-foot-six firecracker to reveal a cast of characters she hadn’t seen in years. </span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>It would be uncouth to describe just how much blubbering Sarah did on her own front doorstep, but it was certainly enough that her laughter was rough and watery as Ludo tried to duck into her home without completely ruining the door. It was no simple task (and perhaps a violation of the normal laws of physics), but it was accomplished, and no sooner had the door swung shut behind him than Sarah found herself in a puddle of fur and whiskers and hugs on her living room floor. </span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>Everyone was asking twenty-five questions at once, and her adrenaline was running so high that she could just about keep up with all of it. Fitting the better part of four years, two schools, and moving to the city into five minutes was no easy task, but Sarah Williams had run the labyrinth and won, and thus told the story from the floor of her Columbia apartment like it was nothing at all. </span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>Once completed, and with the promise of cake awaiting, she clambered out of the pile to find Jareth, or at least tell him to bugger off while she had a proper birthday party. She didn’t particularly want to deal with how smug she knew he’d be at her happiness, but she’d take smug over lurking ominously in the room where she slept. (And she didn’t want to know how he’d react if he knew she’d forgotten about him for a moment.)</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>It wasn’t an easy task, hauling herself off the floor when she’d just gotten used to it, but she did, sure that she looked a right mess but too pleased to care. She at least made a point to avoid the backpack this time, making a mental note to pick that up before she inevitably had to vacuum in the morning. But that was a matter for another time, she thought as she bucked up, fixed what she was sure was her terror of a hairdo, turned the corner into her room…</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>...and found nothing.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>Some glitter, a half-empty coffee mug of wine, and some stray papers, but no goblin king. It was as if he’d vanished into thin air the moment she’d turned her back - a trick Sarah hadn’t appreciated at sixteen, and as an adult coached in basic manners, didn’t enjoy much now. Not that she was expecting a goodbye or anything, but he’d gone out of his way to insert himself back into her life, and it didn’t seem like him to leave without a show. </span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>In his place sat a small box on the top of her AC unit, a tiny blue thing Sarah almost hesitated to touch. Never take gifts from fairies; that was the rule, right? Even at twenty-five with nearly two degrees, Sarah still adhered to what she’d learned in her storybooks all those years ago...until Didymus pestered her so much that she finally caved and opened the damn thing. </span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“If I live to regret this,” she said, “it’s on you.” </span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>Hoggle promised that she (hopefully) wouldn’t, and Sarah was happy enough to see them that she didn’t argue the point too much. She was intrigued too, if only on a morbid level, and that was enough to push her into yanking the top off the tiny blue square.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>A small band of gold sat inside, easily mistakable for a child’s playtoy. A sliver of metal shining against her bedroom light, wrapped in and around what it took Sarah the better part of an hour to realize was an opal-carved peach blossom. It was the kind of simple that looked outrageously expensive, and the brief thought that it looked almost like her stepmother’s wedding ring was nearly enough to make her shove it right back in the box - had Didymous not insisted she try it on. </span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>(It fit perfectly on her ring finger.)</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>I</span>
  <span>t wasn’t until later, after she’d eaten her cake and been serenaded by a completely tone-deaf Hoggle that she saw the note that went with it. She nearly missed it, tucked against the side of the small, navy box - a tiny piece of parchment paper, like something torn out of an ancient library book. On it, scrawled six little words she hardly even needed to read: </span>
</p>
<p>
  <em>
    <span>To make up for the peach. </span>
  </em>
</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>i am david bowie trash and y'all are really just gonna have to deal with it huh</p></blockquote></div></div>
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